A comparative modelling analysis of firm performance

The ongoing financial and economic crisis throughout the industrialised world has spotlighted a number of significant deficiencies in corporate governance and management. The strength and composition of the management team along with effective corporate governance policy should play an important role in addressing these challenges. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how analytics can be used to identify the importance of specific organisational factors that could impact corporate performance. A WRDS database consisting of a variety of factors was examined using Logit, neural net and CART modelling techniques. The results from the analysis indicate that diversity and governance policies appear to have played only a modest role in explaining corporate performance as measured by Tobin's Q for the year 2004.